Speed skating at the 2014 Winter Olympics – Men's 1500 metres

The men's 1500 metres speed skating competition of the 2014 Winter Olympics was held at Adler Arena Skating Center on 15 February 2014.[1]

Men's 1500 metres at the XXII Olympic Winter Games
Podium
Venue	Adler Arena Skating Center
Date	15 February 2014
Competitors	40 from 18 nations
Winning time	1:45.00
Medalists
Zbigniew Bródka  Poland Koen Verweij  Netherlands Denny Morrison  Canada

Speed skating at the 2014 Winter Olympics
Qualification
500 m	men	women
1000 m	men	women
1500 m	men	women
3000 m		women
5000 m	men	women
10,000 m	men
Team pursuit	men	women

The 2010 Olympic champion, Mark Tuitert of the Netherlands, sought to defend his title; he bettered the track record, but eventually finished fifth. Poland's Zbigniew Bródka won the gold medal, the Netherlands' Koen Verweij took silver, and Canada's Denny Morrison took the bronze. After Verweij's race in the last pair of the event, it took about half a minute before it was announced that Bródka had beaten Verweij's time by 3 thousandths of a second, which is 4.1 cm, given the finishing speed of Verweij being 49.4 km/h. Measurements in thousandths were only introduced in speed skating after the 2010 Olympics, so this was the closest win in Olympic speed skating history.[2][3] Two comparably narrow victories had previously been recorded at the Olympics overall. At the 1998 Winter Olympics, Silke Kraushaar beat her teammate Barbara Niedernhuber by 0.002 seconds in the Women's luge event,[2] while at the 1972 Summer Olympics Karl Gunnar Larsson beat Tim McKee by 0.002 seconds in the 400 meters individual swimming medley. The latter narrow win in effect brought about a change so that no swimming competition henceforward would have to be decided by a margin less than a hundredth of a second.[4]

The gold medal awarded in this event featured a Chelyabinsk meteor fragment to commemorate the first anniversary of this meteor strike.[5]